I have the Macbook Pro 16 and have been using it for a few months now. Overall, I think its pretty bad laptop for how expensive it is. Yes Apple fixed many things people were complaining about but it is a perfect example of how Apple has stopped innovating and stopped caring about the MacBook line. In fact, I dislike it so much I have started using my 10 year old MacBook Air instead of my brand new Macbook Pro.
Things I dislike about the MBP 16:
- Still has the touch bar
- Screen size is awful. I like to work with windows size by size and the 16 inch screen size is awkward because most website won't re-size properly.
- Its heavy as hell, slightly thinker than the old ones.
- Its slow. Yes, all the RAM and CPU and the thing is
laggy. I don't know why but it just has a bad "feel" to it.
- Touchpad is too big. Its gigantic and I often end up touching it by accident.
- Its crazy expensive
In the end, I will end up selling it and using my 10 year old Macbook Air until it dies. After that I'm not sure.. maybe I will try the newer Macbook Air and see if its tolerable. At least it doesnt have a touchbar.
My experience has been quite different from yours, so I figured I'd share mine as well.
- Yep touchbar just sucks, I've spent too much time messing around with with the default version, bettertouchtool, and pock, and I cannot find anything its good at. Worse yet, the volume slider often will freeze the touch bar completely.
- The screen size and format is wonderful. I hate how Dell and Thinkpad laptops I've used in the past, have these widescreen formats, where very few lines of code can be visible at a time due to the limited vertical space.
- I didn't realize this until you pointed it out, but it's definitely very heavy compared to my 15-inch 2018 model and thinkpad x230. This haven't bothered me at all, however.
- It feels significantly faster than my 2018 model, and the CPU temperature stays much lower under the same workloads.
- I know a lot of people have trouble with this, so if you've previously had this problem the 16 inch doesn't change that. Both my hands rest on the touch pad while typing, and I have not had this problem once. Your mileage may vary.
- I got mine discounted down to roughly 2k. Pretty ridiculous yeah!
- The battery life is insane. On a simple workload it will last me an entire day. On my full workload (Flutter development with android and ios simulators open) it lasts about half a day.
In the end I'm very happy with my purchase. I wouldn't be surprised if I'm still using this laptop 8 years from now.
Other than C++ in high school, Perl was one of the first languages that I learned. At the time I was working on Unix systems in a closed off, secured area with no access to the internet. I was doing systems work, and the only tools I really had at my disposal was what was on the servers I had in the space with me. If I was lucky I got a system with a modern Linux OS on it like Red Hat, but sometimes I had to work on a Solaris UNIX system that was pretty bare bones.
The options for scripting were either bash or perl. After some digging around I found some scripts that other engineers wrote in Perl. Mostly using it for text replacement, regex, and basic server functions.
I was intrigued by the weird syntax and very powerful one liners, so I got some books and taught myself basic Perl. I started writing some quick scripts and it made me feel like I had a super power. Most of all, Perl was fun with all the different ways you could do things. It was like a puzzle.
Fast forward to my first "real" software job. Most of the code case was written in Python, so I started learning that. I wrote a couple scripts in Perl to do some basic text stuff that I thought would actually be less elegant in Python. While I thought I was quite clever, the other engineers immediately jumped on me and told me to never write any Perl code again. Something about "hard to maintain", "too many ways to do it", etc.
After that I never wrote any "real" code in Perl, but I kind of want to write some clever, convoluted Perl code just because I can.
My sister in law has kids that are in the 7 - 13 year range. The girl specifically (she's 9 or so) will just put on a youtube video and then just watch whatever it recommends after that endlessly.
To adults, the content is absolute garbage, but to her its entertaining. I noticed that most of the stuff she watches is just some tweens or twenty somethings doing every day life stuff (sitting in a pool, making spaghetti, etc). The only real difference is that they do it with high energy and make a big deal out of everything.
WOOOOAAA noodles feel weird!
NO WAAAYY the sauce is RED!!
HOLY COW this hot TUB is SO HOT!
I guess it works because these videos often have 400k to millions of views.
The walrus operator does not feel like Python to me. I'm not a big fan of these types of one liner statements where one line is doing more than one thing.
It violates the philosophies of Python and UNIX where one function, or one line, should preferably only do one thing, and do it well.
I get the idea behind the :=, but I do think it's an unnecessary addition to Python.
A lot of folks see Go as a Python successor which surprises me because I don't think the languages favor the same things at all. Maybe my perspective is weird.
I support your view, but want to make you aware that early unix did favour a little cleverness to reduce line counts (and even character counts). C's normal assignment operator does what python's walrus does, for example. Or look at pre/post increment/decrement operators. Or look at languages like sed, or bc, they try to be terse over anything else.
The unix philosophy of simplicity was on a per tool basis, not function or line of code. The walrus operator is Python version of what we can do now in C or in JS, doing plain assignment in an expression while evaluating it for truthiness. And more often than not, the point of that single-purposeness in Unix is so you can chain a bunch of piped commands that result in a perl-like spaghetti command that's three terminal widths long.
The new Macbook Air is now the go-to (Mac) laptop for developers. If I were to get a new Macbook today, I would get the Air. It's now the only laptop without the touchbar, it has a Retina display, and you can get it with 16 GB of RAM. I see no reason to get a Macbook Pro at this point. Its more expensive than the air, heavier, has the awful touchbar, and 2 unnecessary USB-C ports (I've never needed more than two).
For me, the much lower TDP of the air series really limits its power. If you want to do a decent amount of computation actually on the machine then the 15 inch pro is much more compelling.
I'm in the same boat. I have it frozen to use as regular keys. So basically I have the same functionality as a regular keyboard, with the caveat that sometimes the keys don't work, and there is no haptic feedback.
Typing delay is a pet peeve of mine. This is why I have stuck with Sublime and Vim even though there are more powerful editors out there like VsCode or PyCharm.
I find VS Code to be just about the only electron-based editor I can use without getting frustrated with typing latency. It's usually not noticeable unless the process is chugging for unrelated reasons.
Things I dislike about the MBP 16:
- Still has the touch bar
- Screen size is awful. I like to work with windows size by size and the 16 inch screen size is awkward because most website won't re-size properly.
- Its heavy as hell, slightly thinker than the old ones.
- Its slow. Yes, all the RAM and CPU and the thing is laggy. I don't know why but it just has a bad "feel" to it.
- Touchpad is too big. Its gigantic and I often end up touching it by accident.
- Its crazy expensive
In the end, I will end up selling it and using my 10 year old Macbook Air until it dies. After that I'm not sure.. maybe I will try the newer Macbook Air and see if its tolerable. At least it doesnt have a touchbar.